Ah, we all know the claim offshore outsourcing is good for America. Seems offshore outsourcing is great for drug dealers and money launders too. Did you know offshore outsourcing enabled money laundering, flash crashes and failed projects?

The DFS probe found that SCB had assured the New York state in May 2010 that it would take immediate steps to comply with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions. However, another regulatory examination in 2011 found continuing and significant Anti Money Laundering failures.

Among these, the bank was outsourcing its "entire OFAC compliance process for the New York branch to Chennai, India, with no evidence of any oversight or communication between the Chennai and the New York offices."

HSBC's staff in India have come under the scanner for deficiencies in their role as "offshore reviewers" of the global banking giant's compliance to safety mechanism against money laundering and terrorist financing.

A probe by the US senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations found that HSBC's anti-money laundering (AML) compliance department, which included employees in India, was highly inadequately staffed.

Besides, deficiencies were found in the quality of the work done by HSBC's "offshore reviewers in India", who were used for clearing a major backlog of suspected transaction alerts at the bank.

More than one-third of the alerts already resolved by the Indian reviewers and others "had to be re-done" after an independent assessment by the OCC (the US office of the comptroller of the currency, which is the bank's primary federal regulator in the country).

The probe further found that an OCC visit to India in 2007 had revealed "Weak Monitoring Procedures" in the bank's internal control systems.

Knight Capital Group lost $440 million by a flawed High-frequency trading software program in the space of an hour. Did you know Knight Capital Group uses H-1B foreign guest workers for their tech? Knight Capital Groups trading catastrophe was bad software. Anyone familiar with software design knows this is an amazing boneheaded play to update software without rigorous regression testing and simulations. Here's what happened on the tech end.

It's clear that Knight's software was deployed without adequate verification. With a deadline that could not be extended, Knight had to choose between two alternatives: delaying their new system until they had a high degree of confidence in its reliability (possibly resulting in a loss of business to competitors in the interim), or deploying an incompletely verified system and hoping that any bugs would be minor. They did not choose wisely.

With a disaster of this magnitude - Knight's stock has nosedived since the incident -- there is of course a lot of post mortem analysis: what went wrong, and how can it be prevented in the future.

The first question can only be answered in detail by the Knight software developers themselves, but several general observations may be made. First, the company's verification processes were clearly insufficient. This is sometimes phrased as "not enough testing" but there is more to verification than testing; for example source code analysis by humans or by automated tools to detect potential errors and vulnerabilities. Second, the process known as hazard analysis or safety analysis in other domains was not followed. Such an analysis involves planning for "what if..." scenarios: if the software fails, what is the worst that can happen? Answering such questions could have resulted in code to perform limit checks or carry out "fail soft" procedures.

Assuredly the actual lack of software testing, verification and proper design will come out more, but currently the SEC is seemingly looking at this as a risk management issue, instead of an engineering disaster.

Financial firms such as Citigroup (C.N), Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) and Aviva (AV.L) are among the biggest clients of Indian IT giants such as Infosys (INFY.NS), Tata Consultancy Services (TCS.NS) and Wipro (WIPR.NS).

The New York regulator rapped Standard Chartered for "outsourcing of the entire OFAC compliance process for the New York branch to Chennai, India, with no evidence of any oversight or communication between the Chennai and the New York offices."

Wired did an in-depth piece on high frequency trading systems. The race is on, not to invest in America or American companies, but to design the ultimate rigged electronic roulette wheel, a better picosecond mousetrap.

Faster and faster turn the wheels of finance, increasing the risk that they will spin out of control, that a perturbation somewhere in the system will scale up to a global crisis in a matter of seconds. “For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene,” said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England, at another recent conference. “That gap is set to widen.”

This movement has been gaining momentum for more than a decade. Human beings who make investment decisions based on their assessment of the economy and on the prospects for individual companies are retreating. Computers—acting on computer-generated market trend data and even newsfeeds, communicating only with one another—have taken up the slack. Conventional economics views all this as an unalloyed good: It is axiomatic that all trades are a net benefit to the economy because they enhance “liquidity,” the ability of investors to buy or sell assets at the best price. Indeed, in 2007 the SEC instituted an ambitious new rule, the national market system, that opened the door to dozens of new venues for stock trading, but now that transaction times are measured in micro­seconds and prices are carried out to six decimal places, those opportunities have arguably gone past a point of diminishing returns.

In other words, we have Wall Street offshore outsourcing to India, quality unknown, while creating systems which in the blink of an eye have contagion risk written right into the software.

Offshore outsourcing is routinely part of our government. We all know IBM has offshore outsourced every tech job not nailed down as well as imported thousands of foreign guest workers. That explains why the Census website is unusuable and cost $33.3 million bucks to boot.

When I wrote last month about the Census Bureau's horrible website, I got a lot of messages from other reporters and policy researchers agreeing that Census.gov makes them want to tear their hair out.

But it gets worse! Today, I learned that the new version of American FactFinder -- just one borderline-unusable section of the much larger universe of brain-melting user experiences that is Census.gov -- was developed by IBM at a cost to taxpayers of $33.3 million. Census has a website that isn't just terrible, it's also extremely expensive.

From small projects to the use of taxpayer money for offshore outsourcers like IBM, the herd behavior to labor arbitrage IT, engineers and offshore outsource continues. This is in the face of massive failures like just the few listed above.

In tough economic times, many companies slash staff and turn to outsourcing, yet that strategy may doom their products, And, in good times, as with Toyota, losing control over critical components can contribute to failure, according to study led by Lyda Bigelow, business-strategy professor in the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business.

Her team found that companies were more likely to fail when they outsourced components critical to their competitive position.

“Across the board, we find statistically significant increases in the failure rate for firms that don’t consider transaction costs in their outsourcing decisions,” she said. “Firms need to look beyond production costs to other costs such as poor quality, delivery delays and risk of price increases by suppliers.”

Their work shows that failure rate (either firm bankruptcy or liquidation) increased between 5 percent and 70 percent more than companies that did not outsource, depending on the risk associated with making technological changes, the product type and the company’s market share.

Now we have literally financial compliance and key critical systems being offshore outsourced, or the workers imported instead. Perhaps it's time to stop labor arbitraging the staff, demanding miracles in 30 days or less. Maybe it's time for U.S. businesses to realize how critical in-house U.S. STEM really is. U.S. professionals are not just key to the success of a business, but nowadays to the safety of the global economic system itself. Will that happen? Will America wake up and stop labor arbitraging their workforce? No. The India BPO industry and their U.S. cohorts have lobbyists crawling all over Capital Hill. Outsourcers such as IBM, Infosys market their wares to businesses and governments in an elaborate, politically connected system. This will just continue, one scandal, one failure after another with nary a nod to the fact if American workers had not been cast aside, these past, present and future disasters never would have happened.

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As someone who works with off-shored engineering "talent" all the time, I can detail a number of issues with that approach. The major issue is that our extremely skilled management cannot measure the real cost or cost-savings of the maneuver. It really takes about two highly trained U.S. engineers to clean up after one of the off-shore "talents" that we hire so cheaply. One member of my team, claiming to have two master's degrees in software engineering and math actually was one of five people listed on the four-page master's thesis for software engineering. He could not even operate the keyboard interface (non-graphical) attached to the operating system we use to build our product (and he claimed extensive experience), in spite of the well-polished resume and "degrees". He was hired without any input from our team, based (one would ASSuME) solely on the cost of his labor.

Aside from the brevity and group activity nature of his "thesis", the technical content was pure crap. Can you say, "diploma mill"? I knew you could. Quality has been thrown out the window in favor of "cheap". You will laugh at this: he claimed that we could, through design of experiments (DOE), find the primary variables affecting our final product performance -- without running any actual tests. It took my U.S. trained friend and I about two weeks, and constant argument/research, to disabuse management of this "savings". As it was, our schedule had already been cut and locked in place. Nice.

So it frequently boils down to intangibles. If it cannot be put into a spreadsheet cell and moved around as a single number, it isn't tracked, measured, or managed. Unfortunately, customer loyalty and product quality are intangibles. Salary is tangible, and apparently fungible. Specific performance against specifications and organizational standards, however, are supposedly tangible -- one must conclude that at least our managers are either not capable or not willing to face the truth or enforce the tangibility.

Meanwhile, our benefits and jobs are eroding daily and "massive layoffs" rule the day. I won't comment on the product quality.

I also, by the way ran into a very interesting local comment. Seems one of the local fast-food restaurant chains, already not satisfied with the low wages it was paying had a brilliant idea. On the heels of failed attempts to allow food ordering via kiosk, they were, according to their manager, investigating outsourcing the drive-through window to Guatemala. Needless to say, one misplaced backhoe trench would put that chain out of commission. Manual backup system? Ha.

Oh, one final comment. Did you realize that many of the large banks are also off-shoring the processing of mortgage paperwork? How might our privacy laws protect us when our information has been disclosed to some unknown person in another country?

We used to perform potential problem analysis on our ideas and then eliminate or minimize detrimental effects. That, however, takes local experience with the real problem and the will to act on tangible negatives (no implication of honesty/dishonesty here). I have a precise way of stating this: "Ignorance simplifies any problem". The Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well here in the U.S. and we are outsourcing it.

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I know what you're talking about. Resume fiction is rampant and I believe somewhere there was an astounding percentage of fake degrees coming out of India. Online test answers passed around, coding answers passed around and this is what happens, not just to be "cheap labor" but also the mentality in the U.S., the never ending peddling of "foreigners as superior" to the U.S. engineers is pure propaganda. Look at the education requirements alone, yet that bogus MSc is being accredited as a US MS? The game is rigged, right out of the starting gate, school. Lobbyists/propagandists even manipulate IP statistics, put out bogus studies which are false or manipulated.

This article was just to tie in the latest disasters to offshore outsourcing. I should write up the laundry list of bloated contract failures usually in the millions, sometimes billions.

Anyway, we know you're right, anyone in tech who has been around has seen this 1000 times and incompetence is protected by their "buddies", meanwhile the American who has the skills and experience gets canned, thrown away like a sack of potatoes.

Bottom line, the Knight Group debacle is very obviously clueless software development. How insane is that to release a clearly untested software implementation of an algorithm, PLUS take 45 minutes to remove the package and revert to the old version in real time?

Clearly beyond pathetic, no one who knows the product software development cycle would do such a thing, especially considering what this implementation is working with.

Can you imagine these people being involved in Nuclear safety/failsafe software? I think they are, that's the most scary thing.

Microsoft loves H-1B and as we all know, it's only a matter of time before the Dinosaur is obsolete. I'm sure we'll all cheer, go Linux.

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I'm all for outsourcing Congress + other feds, state politicians, and law enforcement. It would be cheaper and more reliable. If they don't give us what we want, we just move to another locale and then the next one. If these American politicians and officials won't serve the American public despite their employment contracts (and the Constitution) I'm sure we could find people overseas who would for pennies on the dollar. More loyal and cheaper = winning proposition for average American. Plus we don't have all those pesky pay to play bribes that total 100s of 1,000,000s of dollars for our current traitors (sorry, politicians and regulators). Can we also outsource MSM - no thinking is required and rumor has it foreign English skills are getting better than "fair and balanced" and "leaning forward." The US govt. and MSM, brought to you from Manila! I like the sound of it. I volunteer to supervise operations.

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There was actually a guy, who ran for Congress plus had a website "outsource Congress" about 8 years ago.

BTW: Registered users can help control what is on the front page. See that arrow over to the top left of the post? Only people registered and logged in can see it. If you vote "up" on that arrow, posts are moved to the front page. I'm not keen on everything being on the front page, after all the economic monthly statistic overviews I do daily, but maybe this one deserves an up vote on the arrow. ;)

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Just as a side note, many American companies, including government contractors working on military and other security projects, now have very recent immigrants here in the US in key hiring positions. Now finance and tech are well known for doing this, but also be aware that government contractors also engage in this practice. As an American, you will have to go through ridiculous background screening processes that examine everything you've done, where you worked, relatives' backgrounds, etc. As an American, for true masochism, apply for jobs through USAJobs and see how long it takes to be rejected/ignored despite an impeccable background. Do the same with govt. contractors that will keep you hanging on for an imaginary task order that will take 4+ years to materialize. If you are currently working, kiss your current job goodbye as result of these checks - you're current employer will know you are looking for another gig and you're cooked. And periods of unemployment work against Americans too - so you'll get fired and you'll be grilled by future potential employers.
But wait, there's more. The same people helping to make hiring decisions and with access to your Social Security Number and other ID and financial information may possibly very recent immigrants. So, you are a vet or someone that has served in public service, a US citizen since birth, all relatives in the US, but lo' and behold, you will get rejected by recent immigrants with families overseas that have all their schooling and work experience overseas because apparently they work much cheaper than US citizens - and they now have all your personal info. to boot. Check Linkedin - it confirms this is all true. Look at who works in HR and who is making key decisions regarding our Nation and livelihoods - "best and brightest" indeed! Linkedin, it serves a purpose, but not the one the founders (ardent supporters of labor arbitrage and more replacement labor for Americans) intended.

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Happens every day. There are a few lawsuits ongoing right now, two targeting Infosys for making sure they import Indians and do not hire Americans for jobs in America.

When one has entire divisions of nothing but foreign nationals, I don't know what gives better statistics on discrimination against U.S. citizens than that, but of course our politicians or the EEOA won't do anything.

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Watch how pissed off The People's Republic of China and India get when MNCs find that those countries are just too expensive and slave wages and the appropriate bribes are lower in other parts of the world. Oh, you'll see them scream in the WTO and whine about how they need to protect their populations (something the US Government never does with us).

Already MNCs are moving out to the rest of Asia. Then eventually sub-Saharan Africa. And when wages and the people just won't shut up and do what their told, we could have MNCs buy out governments, force people to work for free, and if they don't work for free, they will be sent to prison and work for free, but behind bars. It will make the Dutch in the East Indies look like a forerunner of the 21st Century. Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa was no doubt a god to these lunatics/"best and brightest". Notice how the sociopathic businessmen always set up philanthropies to wash away the stench of their sins, like the Rhodes Scholarship? It's a great PR move. Like the "foundations" of today's crooked kleptocrats - make sure you donate, because they just aren't rich enough already through destroying the middle class.

And that's why our Nation's founders were extremely distrustful of large banks and corporations - they saw the problems and understood the damage they did and would do.

Does this remind you of Western Imperialism? Cecil Rhodes and DeBeers in South Africa? Belgium in the Congo? Chinese prison labor (and now American prison labor) replacing free employees?

I just laid out a business plan that I have no doubt is right at home in many boardrooms today and could be argued by the drones graduating Harvard Business School (you know, the "best and brighest" that can pay $200,000 to repeat slogans and not think too much) and on MSM screens - "Look, if Americans want to be competitive, they just need to stop whining and work harder for less like the 10 years olds in Pakistan" -I swear I could find an intern who could replace a bloated teleprompter reader who could save $10 million/year and do a better job.

Bring it on, 19th Century, here we come again! Only this time prepare to have your financial records and medical records and corporate secrets handled by people in Pakistan that admire Al-Qaeda, and in a few years, by people in Somalia that would accept $5 to look the other way if someone wants to access your medical records. But hey, I'm sure corporate HQ has top people monitoring the situation and no one overseas is corrupt, ever, right Standard Chartered, HSBC, Wells Fargo, etc.?

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Before all of this outsourcing started, companies were routinely having "flunk out" quotas of personnel. So, in other words, 5%, 15% of all staff were supposed to be shoved out the door claiming "performance" issues. Well, there is a problem with that mentality, sometimes to get in the door they already had the best of the best so this was a dog eat dog competition. Many still do this sort of thing today. It's ridiculous.

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Get out of the maze and get back to basics. Get a 2-3 acres piece of land, build a small home with septic and well and Solar and enjoy yourselves growing your own food. To hell with the greedy banksters and corporations. Leave them to their own demise. They will eventually all fail. Stock up on bullets and toilet paper and prepare for the collapse that is coming our way!

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A little orchard, a little farm, and let the hypercompetitive criminals tear themselves apart and look for more victims in their quest for billions more they want to steal. Pre-2000, and especially pre-2008, this kind of thinking was for hermits, Howard Hughes "nutters." But looking around, why not? Peace and quiet, fruits and vegetables, and taking care of those you know and truly care about. Old school lifestyle is now paradise and the long-term unemployed are being forced into it - getting the message, modern 1% society doesn't want them and won't hire them, so what options are left to survive? No HR, no politicians, no banksters, nobody keeping you down.

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Dirt farming, or subsistence agriculture is the occupation of 60 percent of the world's population. That 60% is the bottom 60 percent of the income strata . I am sure the Hierarchy wants all of us to become sharecroppers and get back to the Dust Bowl sooner rather than later. The commodities you hoard will last weeks. After the store shelves are bare, you will need kevlar for insulation and steel shutters when it really gets bad.

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Apple and Foxconn, deal with the repercussions of slave-labor and poor working conditions. Predictable, as always, by the thinking man and woman on the street, but far too much for corporate boards and their puppet politicians to care about. Oh, US Government and corporations and Chamber of Commerce and Fox News, if it's all about profit, profit, profit, then why are the Chinese workers so pissed off? Why don't they see the benefits of slaving away for profits? Don't they know they shouldn't share in your success, but rather their servitude is meant solely for their "betters"? And anyone who thinks the Chinese govt. doesn't have some hand in this and is doing its part to scare Apple and others into sharing even more IP and selling more foreign MNCs' goods as their own is a fool. The Chinese govt. is just reminding the foreign companies who really has control, and if Congress and multinationals ever forgot that for one second, than they really are incredibly dim.

US Government, I don't want to hear one word or see one thing done by you to protect Apple or Foxconn. These companies do nothing for the American worker (other than replace him/her at every turn) and they don't even support the USA through sharing the tax burden the average American does. They don't pay for the US State Dept. or Trade Representative, or State Department, or other activities they apparently enjoy for free (other than "lobbying fees" and "election contributions" aka bribes). No, these outsourcers and fake "American" corporations like Apple have screwed us at every turn, now as stated here repeatedly, let them enjoy the fruits of their labor. In fact, they repeatedly tell us they don't care about America, our ideals and freedoms, and they only care about profits. They repeatedly admit they aren't "American" corporations, but somehow still get the benefits of our bought-for politicians doing everything for them at the expense of actual American citizens. So let them see what happens when the Government ignores them, as they have purposely ignored our cries for help for years now. Next on the riot list? Oh, any spot where these companies don't care about people, America's founding ideals, democracy, or the rule of law. You think China is giving you problems now? Try things when places where the government has far less control get pissed off. Set up operations in Pakistan and see what happens when Apple's CEO is confronted by 100,000 people that simply don't understand why the US Congress and CEOs and corporate boards seem to hold them in such little regard. Is it that the average workers are actually brighter, harder working, and more honest than Congress, CEOs, and boards? Indeed.

Now sit back and grab some popcorn and watch CEOs and their paid-for politicians and talking puppets on Bloomberg and CNBC and Fox drone on and on about how good the workers have it and why this violence is bad for business. Come on, working for Foxconn building i-crap for free as an intern is valuable "work experience" that young Chinese should pay for, or so I'm told by dolts that couldn't last 5 minutes on a Foxconn production line. Yawn.

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Already there is a huge increase in ID theft and successful and unsuccesful thefts involving bank accounts and other types of info. handled overseas. Again, this is so predictable. So while the nonthinkers keep repeating "war on terror, war on terror," they are all to happy to have banksters and big corporations farm out sensitive personal and financial information overseas where protecting that information is impossible and even if it is stolen, it's impossible to hold anyone accountable, especially when these same banksters insulate themselves purposely (hey, jokers, we know every move you make, it's obvious) through contractors and foreign courts are much worse than American courts at protecting American 99%ers (especially when it would be a private American vs. their own citizens). And when you raise these issues with any politician and govt. official who should care about our security and sensitive information that terrorists and criminals love (e.g., law enforcement, bank employees, politicians), they give you a blank stare and repeat, "profits, job creators, profits." If you want to give them a stroke, make them choose between ID theft + aiding terrorists vs. corporate PROFITS. Oh my, what to do?!

Well, when no one trusts banks or corporations with any personal information when thefts are happening monthly and people's medical information is abused, I want those same dopes to keep spewing, "outsourcing good, profits, job creators, NAFTA, etc." as modern society grinds to a halt as private citizens can't trust the govt. or law enforcement or banks to protect their interests and everyone resorts to dealing solely with people they know. And both parties promise more of the same? Truly dimwitted, predictable because of the corruption, but dim nonetheless. Perhaps holding those responsible, you know, because corporations "are people too" for treating our SSN and bank account and medical records so carelessly personally responsible will fix this situation within 24 hours. Jamie Dimon causes someone's bank account to be drained or some company lets patent secrets be stolen overseas because the CEO wanted a bigger bonus in the USA and they are held personally responsible because "corporations are people too" and things get fixed ASAP. See, people can go to prison for ID theft or aiding theft or violating security rules and regulations or endangering people's lives and welfare. So, you want to be treated as people, I'm all for it. Now you're personally responsible. Can't take all the benefits of limited responsibility and still claim you are people too, can you? So choose.

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This is what happens when Americans that care and have experience + education + skills are purposely not hired and screwed in application processes so cheaper laboroverseas can be hired.
Type in "ID theft" and "outsourcing" and you'll see stories coming up with warnings years ago, so it's been raised under all sorts of Presidents, both parties, and Americans who gave a sh*t and could predict the problems were ignored.
Sample: Filipino security 5+ years ago handling Chase "Jamie Dimon rules our politicians" accounts. After US employees were aware of someone repeatedly trying to steal money and unable to come up with correct ID info., (US employees had access to Lexis-Nexis) they repeatedly told Filipino center to leave account blocked. Filipinos working for Chase weren't trusted with Lexis-Nexis. Thief gets blocked by US employees, gets into Filipino outsourced security employees at a different time, and he gets the information he needs from them. He then gets cleared and steals $40,000 from account! 5+ years ago and it was raised. The writer says Chase was a revolving door and seniority came if you had more than one year!
So the victim suffers for the rest of his life because his SSN and everything else was compromised due to outsourcing. Does Chase pay law enforcement for the wasted time and effort they will now spend dealing with this ID theft? Possible false arrests of the victim? The victims time and wasted $ for the rest of his life? These are all very real issues - others will spend $ and their time until they die fixing the issues Chase and Dimon don't care about because they want short-term profits and massive bonuses. They are shifting the entire cost onto the customers (all fines and fees are always shifted to customers) and the govt. that has to clean up the mess. That is not capitalism at all, nor is it just.

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Too funny/disturbing, just read this at ZH and then checked out multiple articles from Reuters. Apparently the same British contractor that screwed up Olympics' security in London is also guarding our nuclear facilities. Awesome! No need for US govt. guards paid good wages and that undergo the standard endless security checks we all have to undergo for jobs at 7-11 these days, let's pay foreign contractors to do the job, and to do the job so poorly that nuns in their 80s can break in! Well, I have no doubt the nuns will be treated in the harshest terms possible while the job creators that allowed it will still be rich and free and the people that love outsourcing at all costs will stay mute. Remember another British contractor forced unemployed British citizens to work for free overnight as part of "training" and "for possible employment" during the Queen's Jubilee? Maybe our government and foreign corporations can force unemployed foreigners to work for free guarding all of our military bases, borders, and nuclear facilities because there simply aren't any unemployed Americans with the skills or experience that could allow nuns to break into nuclear facilities. I honestly think in 2012 it would be impossible to carry out something like the Manhattan Project, we'd have contractors from Japan and Germany guarding the facilities because they would work very cheaply and that's what it's all about apparently.

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I don't know what happened here but somewhere someone thought the government is evil and they bypassed laws outsourcing critical security and other DoD, DHS types of contracts to private contractors and now we have way, way, way worse scenarios for security.

If you see something about costs, beyond not generating U.S. citizen jobs, let's see it.

Are you sure these are not U.S. citizens? A lot of national security contracts, private contractors still require U.S. citizenship plus various security clearances. Each clearance costs about $20k to the employer, they ain't cheap and also run on really ridiculous criteria.

Unless there is proof I wouldn't say the actually contract employees are Brits, "taking our jobs", although I do believe we have offshore outsourcing of jobs, not going to U.S. citizens all over in government contracts, DoD, federal, state, local.

So stupid, that's taxpayer money just flowing out of the country when our money should support our workforce. (Keynesian stimulus 101).

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G4S is the British umbrella corp., the subsidiary is American, so Americans probably used.
However, this is absolutely the case in American Embassies overseas (even in places like Afghanistan), contractors are used in addition to our own troops to guard the Embassies and/or Consulates and those contractors use foreign nationals (alone or in addition to US citizens). There were major stories coming out of Kabul in recent years.

The reasoning is probably that there just aren't enough Marines to guard all the postings (consider how many Embassies and Consulates we have in places just in Russia, China that are relatively safe and secure but need US postings in all the major cities, and then you go all across every single place in Africa and Asia) so then the contractors get involved, and then they hire local nationals, nationals from other countries (besides the US and the host nation), as well as any Americans they might want. Some may be great and some may not be, like everything else, depends on the individuals. Absolutely not US citizens guarding all our facilities in every position, and when price becomes a key issue for the private companies and their bids, there can be very, very serious consequences. Reuters and AP don't cover all these incidents, but just consider how many hostile, unstable places there are that we have to have people in but never get covered on the news (e.g., Central African Republic, the DRCongo). Even government contractors here are using foreigners that recently moved to the US (within 10 years - verify this on Linkedin) in HR positions, so they have access to SSNs, etc. and while US citizens have to go through extensive background checks that would get them fired if they had a current job, foreign nationals that came from overseas within the last decade are already working there.

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They are using foreigners on contracts, including many with security clearance requirements. We see in the news almost routinely of foreigners busted for industrial espionage, so U.S. corporations and business generally not thinking citizenship matters or loyalty matters is common.

Well, beyond the recent now realized terror attacks on embassies the thing that worries me is Iran and nuclear weapons. That guy is clearly bat shit crazy, evil and Israel's warning was frightening.

But this isn't my topic area, I'm just another new digester cog in the wheel on foreign policy, events.

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Fellow Americans, have your medical or financial records compromised once, maybe shocked and pissed. "Oh, we'll reimburse you" say the banksters and employees over endless phone calls and conversations as they eye the 5 PM end of the day as you fret over ID theft or compromised info. Thanks jackholes, but reimburse me for letting someone steal my money in the first place? How's that for a deal? Are you giving me extra $? Is the CEO or head of outsourcing or security fired or suspended or fined? No? Is Senator A or Rep. B going to rip these clowns a new one for treating your life like yesterday's trash. Then I'm actually worse off because we have to file reports, follow through with ID theft at this police station or with that agency, etc. and you go on and on living the bankster lifestyle. Is Wells Fargo CEO fined $5,000 for every breach? No? F that. Second time, move on over to small, local folks. More likely than not they aren't shipping SSN and personal info. to Bangalore or looking to hire an intern to work for free to handle your account info., and if they are, we won't have to be pawned off like we're scum merely for wanting to protect our money, our medical records, our personal info. Outsourcing and all the other crap pays off for the big douches short-term, long-term, WHIRLWIND is a comin'!

In a few years the banksters and politicians and media will sit there scratching their heads as everyone keeps cash in vaults in their homes or local banks and no one will dare do business with people they don't personally know/trust, grinding everything to a halt or much slower pace. Think real local (which is actually very nice in many ways - just because it doesn't involve the Internet or TBTF or global finance doesn't make it "backwards" and served many people for many centuries). Who could have guessed that would be the outcome? Well, anyone with an ounce of sense that gets tired of being ripped off and burned and ignored by those in charge getting rich and powerful.

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